442550 - Simplifying Add-On-Installation Through Firefox-Add-On

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 295462

(Thunderbird :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Sebastian Moser]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Version 2.0.0.14 (20080421)

Add-on-installation is not nearly as easy in Thunderbird as it is in Firefox. The add-on has to be downloaded, the add-on-management-window opened, the file selected.

To simplify that process, I suggest the following:

Thunderbird installs a Firefox-extension that changes the way Firefox installs add-ons. When Firefox validates an add-on, it checks if it is compatible with the installed Thunderbird version. If it is, it doesn't show an "this is incompatible"-message, but offers to install the add-on to Thunderbird.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.



Thunderbird users are most likely Firefox users, too - and probably have already installed a Firefox-add-on. If Thunderbird-add-on-installation behaved like for Firefox' add-ons, it would ease the installation of add-ons and likely increase the use of add-ons in general.

If simplifying add-on-development in Thunderbird 3 is a general goal, simplifying the add-on-installation process should be a priority, too.

Comment 1

[rsx11m]

Yes, it's a known issue. Given that Firefox and Thunderbird are independent applications (by design), this is not trivial though. Also, keep in mind that many extensions have multiple applications they can install in, thus this may be ambiguous.

Your suggestion corresponds to the one made in bug 295462 comment #8:
> Maybe there needs to be some per-system 'XUL app registry' in which you can
> look up an executable name (or a execution line, e.g. "/path/to/myxulapp
> --install-extension $ext" with $ext set to the extension filename/URI) against
> the em:id value you find in the XPI. And if you have multiple em:id's there's
> be a listbox for selecting which app to install the XPI in.